First Report Issued on Crash Killing Senator

By MATTHEW L. WALD

Published: December 18, 2002

WASHINGTON, Dec. 17—
When the plane carrying Senator Paul Wellstone and six others crashed in October, both engines and propellers appear to have been working normally, federal investigators said today.

The investigators added that they were working to ''more accurately define the icing conditions that existed along the accident flight's route.''

In a brief announcement, the National Transportation Safety Board also said a radio beacon signal at the destination, Eveleth-Virginia Municipal Airport, was ''slightly out of tolerance'' for use for landing at the time of the crash.

At the point when the pilots should have seen the runway directly in front of them if they had navigated correctly, the plane, a chartered King Air A100, was about a mile to the south, investigators said. But whether it had turned off course because of the faulty navigation beacon or because of icing or some other reason is not clear, investigators said.

Visibility was poor amid light snow and freezing rain. In such conditions, planes can quickly accumulate a thin layer of ice that reduces lift by disrupting the flow of air over the wings.

The plane crashed and burned about two and a half miles from the airport. Senator Wellstone, a Minnesota Democrat; his wife; daughter; and three aides were killed, along with two pilots. Autopsies of the pilots by a Federal Aviation Administration laboratory found no drugs or alcohol, investigators said.

The navigation beacon, a Very High Frequency Omnidirectional Radio beacon, known as a VOR, was accurate enough for flight through the area but not for an instrument approach, the board said. One investigator said the signal had ''a bend'' in the electronic path that it drew to the runway 5 to 10 miles from the airport. Bends are common, but this one was larger than allowed, the investigator said.

VOR signals are far less accurate than the instrument landing systems at bigger airports, and pilots who follow them expecting to find the runway sometimes end up too far to one side. If the air is clear enough, pilots can often see the runway end and correct their course before this becomes a problem. But failing to find the runway end does not normally result in a crash, experts say.